Did you think this was Microsoft Word? You could be forgiven for thinking so, it looks very similar to Word 2000 or 2003!!

This is AbiWord which is a free open source word processor application we have included on the xBible. The layout of the icons for all the functions is close enough to Microsoft Word 2003 without having to pay for a copy or use a illegally obtained copy.

Here, our computer has Microsoft Word 2010, and with this and many other traditional apps on your computer, it tends to show what documents which have been recently worked on, if someone has logged onto the same profile as you, making it not secure, with a public or shared computer.

AbiWord is perfect for writing letters for home or business, you can also use this for bible notes or anything.

‘Unmount’ your xBible USB flash drive when you have finished and you can carry your word processor onto another computer.

Reminder: we don’t write these applications as we just found these goodies to bundle them into the xBible project, if you need technical help with AbiWord, here is the support page: http://www.abisource.com/

We have a rough prototype of our xBible project. The finished one will be freely available on the web for Christians to download themselves and using personally sourced USB sticks made up and given to their friends in different countries.

The trouble is, our working prototype is a bit under 8 Gigabytes in size.

Strangely when we compressed the image with 7Zip (free alternative to Winzip) and it ended up being bigger than the original file!! As you can see it took maybe 45 minutes to try and compress.

The other issue was knowing where to host it.

Dropbox gives you 2Gb of online disk space, more if you spam recommend your friends. Google Docs gives you 5Gb for free account. A friend told us about Mega.co.nz.
50Gbs of cloud storage for nothing? wow!! trouble is, when uploading this one file, which it said 2 hours rough time (we left it overnight) it caused our browser (Chrome) to crash. It seems cloud apps with browser controller front ends have a habit of doing this. The file is too large to hold in the whole memory (4Gb in that PC) of the computer. Sometime ago when using Microsoft’s Skydrive, some similar things happened when with different browsers.

Oh well, looks like we will need to pay a fee for hosting.

For techies interested in our project feel free to comment with any ideas. At the moment we just want to share the prototypes with our developer friends from other continents.

For those of us who normally live in the west, we take it for granted we have free speech and we can openly express dissatisfaction of our governments without fear of someone taking us away and locking us up.

In countries like the Islamic world, China and North Korea, believers in Jesus can’t carry bibles around, nor purchase or obtain them in any way.

We hope we can can get the xBible project running, to provide some help to some those brothers and sisters who have found Jesus or who are curious, and provide them a low cost way to get into the word if they have access to a computer.

We have been playing around different types of USB flash drives to establish what works well with the xBible project

We had an old white Kingston 1Gb one bought 5 years ago, and as it was on our keys, the plastic casing started to get brittle and break off leaving its naked circuit board exposed, still working of course, but we copied all the data off it onto a new one and threw away. We would recommend Kingstons still today.

Some are so small now that they are too easily to lose. This HP 16Gb one in the middle was disappointing as its stopped working suddenly and its not even 1 year old.

The Sandisk blade is our favorite, it doesn’t have a cap (which get lost anyway) and its small but not too small and has minimal metal components. In theory this could be taken through an airport or border crossing and not set off the metal detector.

USB flash drives that come with some kind of special encryption already made up may not work well, as they are already divided into two drives, and this can’t easily be wiped off. In theory it might work, but this presents more complexity for the end user to use on his computer, especially if he doesn’t have an IT person to help him out.

For any Christian organization planning to implement xBibles into a country unfriendly to Christianity we would recommend buy a small number of one particular model just to make sure they work well before committing to buying a large quantity.